Facebook is gearing up to stomp clickbait headlines

Facebook is taking a swing at food ordering and event management with its new features for the social network. Image Source: Today News

Not one month goes by without Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) making changes on the social media interface. Now, all those click baits, Facebook pages, and websites that frequently withhold, distort or exaggerate information in their headlines will disappear from the News Feed.

On the company’s news blog, Facebook researchers claim the new anti-clickbait algorithm will verify the authenticity of every story linked in a user’s feed, as well as identify the patterns of stories people find misleading or marked as spam.

Click-bait was stealing traffic from the social media, and you won’t believe what Facebook did next!

Annoying or deceitful writing is soon to say goodbye to the blue social network. And Facebook obviously refers to classic shenanigans such as ‘You won’t believe what happen next’ hoping for advertising revenue.

These kinds of headlines, says the social media, leave out crucial information to force people to click to find out the answer. This is also true for commercials and advertisers, as a flashlight that will never eve run out of batteries will also fall in the claws of the new code.

The filters will look for common phrases in click-bait headlines. Image Source: TechGig

Facebook will manually classify tens of thousands of headlines with a spam-score to train the new algorithm. Rather than just coding a binary 1 for “Yes, this is clickbait” or 0 for “No, this is cool,” each single story will get a score atrocious it is.

The higher the score, the more the code will punish the entire page by making all of their post or links less visible. The side-effect is even worse for those sites that publish too many clickbait links during the day, but it will also be forgiving with real official web-pages with minor spam content. When the site stops posting egregious content, their traffic will be back to normal.

Click and exit

Clickbait is often the downside of Facebook’s news feed. Back in 2014, they started an algorithm based on user behavior, but it did not work. In February, Facebook investigated at how little time people spend on this sites, and thus started to identify spam links as ones with many clicks and little likes.

The goal of the News Feed has always been to share stories relevant to the users, and recent changes may punish portals that are not worth our time back into oblivion.